wordpress

Last week I made the decision to move my blogs from shared hosting to a virtual private server (VPS). While I’ve had self hosted blogs for a number of years, I still find myself learning new things all the time, and this was especially true when moving VPS. In my case I was only moving WordPress blogs. I can’t speak to the steps for other types of sites.

Why move and why VPS?

I had considerable problems with uptime during the month of December. Even when my traffic wasn’t particularly high, my site was going down. When I’d submit a trouble ticket, my hosting company at the time would inform me that it was my sites bringing down the server. They suggested I move to a more robust and more expensive VPS solution.

Now I’m not going to bash my former host, they were generally good. But when things would break, they would continue to break for several days or weeks. Finding a true fix didn’t seem to be their strong suit. I wasn’t particularly satisfied with their responses to this situation so I also decided to find a new host.

I set about on a search for a new host, and did some Googling. But I found Twitter to be a valuable resource. After posting the question about hosting providers I received a number of responses that helped me narrow down my search to a couple providers.

They offered a managed VPS solution. I’m not a server admin and didn’t want the responsibility for maintaining my server. That would be a recipe for disaster.

Their support came highly recommended. This was evidenced when I first went to their site and a chat dialogue opened where I could talk with a sales rep about my needs and they could help me in my decision.

They are a Michigan company. I’m based in Michigan, and our state has had a rough go of it lately. Being able to support a local company was definitely a factor for me.

Preparing to Move – Get Your New Service

The timing was fortuitous. If I’m making structural changes to my sites, the week between Christmas and New Year’s is definitely preferable. I’m off work, and so our many other people. So I have time, and not many people are coming to my sites anyways. When stuff goes wrong, I can respond quickly and not as many people notice.

Step one is to sign up for your new service. You’ll need a destination for everything. Things here will probably vary based on the host you choose. In my case I specified a main domain at the time of sign up. Once my server was set up, I then needed to create my other domains on the server. This includes creating the domain, and typically creating accounts for email addresses, FTP access, and SSH access.

Ideally, you don’t have to make DNS changes at this point and you can access your new server via the IP address they provide.

For those of you using WordPress to power your blogs you need to be on the look out for some hacking which appears to be widespread.

If you’re looking at your site you won’t notice it, but if you look at your stats you may notice a dip in referral traffic. The hack redirects visitors to your site coming from Yahoo and Google to a site called anyresults.net.

Not being a techie I can’t fully explain what is going on, but somehow the hacker gets access to upload a file and register it as a plug-in. Fixing it is a pain, and there may be other solutions, but here is what I did:

Look in the wp_options table for the record with active-plugins. If you look at the list of active plugins you’ll see a number of familiar names as well as other characters. But there will also be an image file (jpeg, png) that has a name similar to an image somewhere on your site. That file isn’t actually an image, but a file with a bunch of garbage in it. Note the name and location of the file.

Using your FTP client find the malicious file and delete it.

Going back into MySQL check the users table. I noticed that in each instance there was another user created that doesn’t show up when you go in through your blogs control panel. Delete the record for that user.

Reinstall WordPress. And don’t just do an overwrite, but delete all the files and reload them.

Change your passwords.

This doesn’t seem to discriminate as to the version of WordPress you’re using. I was already at the latest, 2.5.1, and still got hit. I also doubt that these changes will persist so you may have to go through the exercise again – at least until WordPress offers a security update.

Table of contents for What works for me

My favorite thing about WordPress is the vast array of add-on functionality that is available. If you were wishing that WordPress had a feature or function, chances are someone has already developed it. The following are the plug-ins that I lean on heavily on my various sites:

Essentials

Akismet: I find this to be probably the single most important plugin I’ive ever installed. On my Tigers site alone it has saved me from having to moderate over 300,000 comments

WordPress Database Backup: Another essential tool. You can set it to backup your database at regular intervals and have the backups emailed to you, or stored on the server. With this plugin there is no excuse for losing more than a week’s worth of posts should something happen.

Google XML Sitemaps: Want Google to know about all of your pages? Want Google to know how often you are updating those pages? Just install this plugin and it will generate a sitemap that is recognizable by Google and will even ping Google to let them know when you’ve made an update.

WP-ContactForm: Readers have to be able to get in touch with you right? There are several Contact Form plugins available. Just make sure you use one of them.

Accessibility

WordPress Mobile Edition: Have you looked at your site on a mobile device? Did you let the whole thing load or did you get discouraged? This plug-in adapts your existing site and puts it into a mobile browser friendly theme. It’s so easy I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do it.

Full Text Feed: If you’re not a full feed kinda blogger this probably doesn’t apply. In later editions of WordPress the feed truncates if you use the more tag. This will prevent that from happening delivering the full post in the feed.

Chunk Urls: Don’t you hate it when someone leaves a link as a comment, but it is several hundred characters long and breaks your theme? This plug-in will cut those links down to size keeping your site pretty.

Share This Deportes: Make it easy for others to evangelize those great posts. Share This was originally developed by Alex King and provided icons for many popular bookmarking/social sites as well as the ability to email posts. The deportes version is tailored to sports blogs with links to sites like BallHype and Yardbarker.

Smart Archives: Many blogs are shying away from displaying date based archives. However I think that for sports blogs they are still worthwhile because many readers may want to search for information by season. But if you’ve been blogging for a while this can get unwieldy. This plugin neatly arranges those archives into a more manageable format. Here it is in action.

Stickiness

Get Recent Comments: Make it easy for your regular readers to see when new comments have been left, so they know where to leave comments of their own.

Articles: I use this plugin to create a “Best of” page. Just mark those popular articles with a custom tag, and they’ll display on a page of your choosing.

Related Posts: Keep people on your site longer by pointing them to other articles they may care about.

This wasn’t an exhaustive list of all the plugins that I use, just the ones I consider most important. One that wasn’t mentioned in the list was In Series which can link a series of posts together. It’s what is driving this series in fact. Are there plugins that you use or recommend?

Table of contents for What works for me

This is the first post in a series that will look at various elements of blogging, and what I’ve found to work for me. This is hardly a comprehensive list about blogging, or a best of the best list. It’s simply stuff that I’ve tried, that I’ve had success with. It may not work for everyone, and there may (and in many cases are) probably better options or solutions. But hopefully this will prime some discussion and I look forward to feedback and letting others know what works for you.

The Blogging Platform

WordPress is my tool of choice. I started on Blogger and it served me well for a very long time. But 2 years ago I got to the point where I needed functionality that just wasn’t available in Blogger. Blogger has since added quite a bit of that functionality, like categories for example. But because of the hundreds of plug-ins available with WordPress, I don’t think Blogger can ever really catch-up at this point.

Now with WordPress there are two options, a hosted version called WordPress.com and a version you host yourself. There are advantages to the hosted version. The big 2 as I see it are:

It’s free. It costs nothing. No hosting costs are required. No domain needs to be registered. It’s completely free and not a bad route to go if you’re unsure of how committed you are to this blogging thing.

You don’t have to know anything about programming, or maintaining a web site. It’s all taken care of for you. The software is updated automatically as new versions come out. It’s all handled for you which definitely has an appeal in terms of time, and expertise.

Still, I use the .org version. I want control over everything, including access to all the great plug-ins that exist. I also want control over back-ups and control over my content into perpetuity.

Now mind you, I’m not a web expert. I have some programming experience, but none of it is with PHP – the language that WordPress is coded in. And even with that limited knowledge I’m able to get by.

As for the cost, that is really pretty minimal because there is lots of cheap hosting out there.